“I don’t believe you.”
“They’re real. Old Mr. Lief was going through his son’s clothes; he was planning on giving them to the Salvation Army. He found these in the pocket of a winter shirt in the back of his closet. Lief didn’t want his wife to come across them, I suppose. I can’t let you handle them, but you can look at the writing.” He held the pink envelope out so my father could see the address. “You know her handwriting, I would think. There must be plenty of samples around.”
“I want to see the text of those letters.”
“You’ll hear them in court. If I was to read them to you now, the D.A. would have my hide. I wouldn’t do it anyway, with your daughter here.” Sandoz put them back in his pocket. “You wanted to know what we had. Well, that’s what we have, and I believe a judge will think it’s good enough for a warrant.”
He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Now let me think. I believe that’s almost everything, except about the shooting—I said I’d get back to that. We were talking, you’ll remember, about hit men. It was what we call a red herring, but I drug it in myself because I wondered if maybe you’d hired one to do the job on your brother, and I wanted to see how you acted when I talked about one. But I was going to say I didn’t think it had been a hit man, because they hardly ever shoot just once. They know, you see, how hard it is to kill a man with a pistol. Why, just a few years ago there was that man down south that puts out the skin magazine. The guy who shot him did the job with a fortyfour magnum, a gun that would snuff a grizzly bear, and he lived through it.
“Now I want to show you folks something. Mind if I borrow a pencil?”
Before my father could stop him, Sandoz pulled open the upper right-hand drawer of the desk and rummaged in it. When his hand came out again, he was holding a black automatic.
“I’d imagine,” he said, “that we’ll find this is the gun that killed your brother Herbert. You looked a little funny, Mr. Hollander, when I used the phone on this desk, so I thought I might find something. Is this it?”
“Of course not!”
I piped up. “I’ve seen that gun—it’s been in there for years. It’s not even a thirty-eight.”
My father gave me a look that made me feel good all over. “That’s right,” he said. “Bert was shot with a thirty-eight, wasn’t he? A policeman’s gun. That one’s a nine-millimeter; I brought it back from Germany. It even has Nazi markings.”
“Sure,” Sandoz said, holding the gun under the desk light. “Nine-millimeter
My father put his face in his hands.
How I Bailed Out
That much I’ve given you blow-by-blow because I think you ought to have it, but I’m going to spare you a lot of the rest. Just a few minutes after Lieutenant Sandoz pulled the gun out of my father’s desk, another cop came in with the search warrant, and he and Sandoz and the one called Jake started really searching in earnest. Up in Elaine’s bedroom they found a box of mix-and-match stationery—pink, yellow, and blue, just like the letters Mr. Lief had found. Also green, which I guess she hadn’t gotten around to using yet.
You know, people are crazy, and I mean particularly me. It hadn’t really come home to me when Sandoz showed those letters to my father, but it did when Jake came pounding down the front stairs with that box of stationery. It wasn’t even good stuff, just cheap writing paper like you might buy in the Ben Franklin in Barton for maybe a buck seventyfive; and it meant Elaine and Larry had been checking into motels, or maybe doing it in the back of Larry’s van or on that couch in our basement. It made me feel sick; I thought about my father and how he was nuts over Elaine and had been for as long as I could remember, and about Molly and how she was nuts over Larry and believed he was this untarnished knight or something. I hated Elaine then. I hated her for being such a lightweight, so damned good-looking with nothing inside to back it up. I hated her for being my mother, and I hated her for marrying my father. If she’d just let him set her up in an apartment someplace and give her fur coats and diamond bracelets, I wouldn’t have been where I was or anywhere, and that would have been just fine with me.
I think this is one of the things real, pro mystery writers aren’t supposed to say, but I’m going to say it anyhow, and I learned it that day: murderers aren’t any different from you and me. If I ever get really, really mad or really, really greedy, and especially if I get both together, I could murder somebody. So could you. That day, if somebody had tossed me that little Nazi automatic I could have knocked off Elaine when she walked through the door into the study. Which she did.
I was watching her like a hawk—a hawk with a broken wing. When she found out what was going on she turned pink under her powder, and then white; and when she caught on that they were just damned near certain to arrest my father, she fell on her knees and got him by the legs and said, “I’m sorry, Harry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” over and over again until Mrs. Maas came and got her on her feet again and led her away, I guess to lie down somewhere. Just about then Jake came down again, and this time he had two letters from Larry to Elaine. He said they had been under a jewelry box in her vanity.
Sandoz showed them to my father. “Is this how you knew? Did you find them before we did?”
My father shook his head, but he wouldn’t say anything.
And that was about it. Naturally I was stuck on that sofa and couldn’t see anything except what went on in the study. At the time that didn’t bother me, but afterward I wished I could have gone around and watched. It might have been interesting. I know that the other cop, the one that had brought the warrant, spent a lot of time in my father’s shop; and Sandoz spent a lot there in the study, reading papers and even pulling down books and riffling the pages; but the only funny thing he found wasn’t a slip of paper, or even what you could call small. He got down on his knees with a penlight and looked under my sofa, and then stuck his arm in, and what he pulled out was a couple of round, black iron weights with handles on the top. They didn’t seem to mean anything, and after he’d looked at them he pushed them back again.
When the cops were finished and the whole place was a mess, Sandoz went over to my father, coughed, and said, “You are under arrest, Mr. Hollander. Before we ask you any questions, you must understand what your rights are. You have the right to remain silent. You are not required to say anything to us at any time or to answer any questions. Anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to a lawyer, and to have
